[A] Dada exhibition. Another one! What's the matter with everyone wanting to make a museum piece out of Dada? Dada was a bomb ... ...can you imagine anyone, around half a century after a bomb explodes, wanting to collect the pieces, sticking it together and displaying it?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Now you know very well that there are no less than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin. These pieces are strangers to each ot...her, and it takes a century, more or less, to make them thoroughly acquainted. At last they learn to vibrate in harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were a great seed-capsule which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona, or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of fifty or hundred years gets tolerably dry and comparatively resonant. Don't you see that all this is just as true of a poem? Counting each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than in a violin. The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened them, and they don't understand it at first. But let the poem be repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind's muffled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world's crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric. Observe, too, how the drying process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a violin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Getting up some time after midnight to collect the scattered brands together, while my companions were sound asleep, I observed, p...artly in the fire, which had ceased to blaze, a perfectly regular elliptical ring of light, about five inches in its shortest diameter, six or seven in its longer, and from one eighth to one quarter of an inch wide. It was fully as bright as the fire, but not reddish or scarlet, like a coal, but a white and slumbering light, like the glow-worm's. I could tell it from the fire only by its whiteness. I saw at once that it must be phosphorescent wood, which I had so often heard of, but never chanced to see. Putting my finger on it, with a little hesitation, I found that it was a piece of dead moose-wood (Acer striatum).... Using my knife, I discovered that the light proceeded from that portion of the sap-wood immediately under the bark, and thus presented a regular ring at the end, which, indeed, appeared raised above the level of the wood, and when I pared off the bark and cut into the sap, it was all aglow along the log.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Freeing hostages is like putting up a stage set, which you do with the captors, agreeing on each piece as you slowly put it togeth...er; then you leave an exit through which both the captor and the captive can walk with sincerity and dignity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Chance: That tune, they been playin' it all day. What is it?Dude: Oh, it's some Mexican piece. I heard it farther south....<...br />Colorado: Well, they call it "The Deguello," the cutthroat song. The Mexicans played it for those Texas boys when they had them bottled up in the Alamo. Played it day and night 'til it was all over. Now do you know what he means by it?Chance: No quarter, no mercy for the loser.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

[Our family is] a wonderfully messy arrangement, in which relationships overlap, underlie, support, and oppose one another. It did...n't always come together easily nor does it always stay together easily. It's known very good times and very bad ones. It has held together, often out of shared memories and hopes, sometimes out of the lure of my sisters' cooking, and sometimes out of sheer stubbornness. And like the world itself, our family is renewed by each baby.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on t...he earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night--brothers who see now they are truly brothers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »